Op vr 21-11-2003, om 03:22 schreef Noah L. Meyerhans:
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 02:14:23PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > You are ignoring all the packages that don't build and never have been
> > build for some architecture. Mainly that happens if some
> > build-depends, like the compiler needed, wasn't yet ported.
>
> If an architecture is that far from being able to build a package, we
> should probably seriously reconsider supporting it in unstable.
Uh, if we'd do that, we'd end up with nothing but i386. There's a number
of compilers out there that aren't based on gcc, and thus doesn't have
the support for all the platforms supported by that compiler.
Two good examples I can come up with by heart (though I'm sure there are
more) are the Free Pascal compiler, which supports only the ia32 and
m68k family of processors (although the Debian package doesn't support
m68k; I'd have to ask the Debian maintainer why that's the case, but I
assume he's got his reasons), and the (not packaged in debian)
open-cobol compiler, which (IIRC) does not have support for anything
beyond ia32 (and yes, open-cobol implements most of COBOL85).
Moreover, many software and libraries are written in a horrible way,
porting-wise. Stuff such as embedded assembler without an alternative,
assumptions about endianness and other such nightmares happen more than
one would imagine (although less now than what used to be in the past).
Dropping the architecture because of such issues would be silly.
> There
> needs to be some baseline measurement that an architecture needs to
> reach before we can consider it a part of the distribution.
Sure. That baseline is "the base system has to be ported, 90% of the
packages have to be compiled for that architecture[1], and it has to
have an installer".
> Similarly,
> there needs to be some baseline measurement that a package revision
> needs to meet before it can be accepted into unstable (which is, after
> all, the version of Debian that all developers are building their
> packages). The proposal here provides such a baseline.
There has to be a baseline a package needs to meet before it can be
accepted into stable. Unstable is there to be broken from time to time.
The only requirement for unstable is "that a package has been tested",
and I think that's how it should be.
[1] as suggested by http://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-big.png ; it's
possible the release team has higher requirements for an architecture to
be accepted into stable as opposed to an architecture being considered
for a package to migrate to testing.
--
Wouter Verhelst
BVBA NixSys
Louizastraat 14, 2800 Mechelen
+32 15 27 69 50